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Guantanamo Inmate Database: Adil Kamil al Wadi

McClatchy Newspapersby Tom LasseterJune 15, 2008

MANAMA, Bahrain — Adil Kamil al Wadi said that he and the other
prisoners at the U.S. detention camp near Kandahar Airfield slept
outside on plastic tarps, surrounded by bales of concertina wire. It
was December 2001, and they shook all night and day in the cold.

That, he said, was bearable.

Then the American soldiers guarding the men began to taunt them
during their prayers, he said. The detainees would stand in small
groups in their pens and, five times a day, fall to their knees, crouch
forward, touch their foreheads to the ground and pray.

At first, he said, the guards watched silently, bemused and smirking.

Wadi was among the first prisoners taken to the camp, and many of
the soldiers, young men from small towns and cities across America,
probably had never seen Muslims at prayer.

As the days passed, Wadi said, the soldiers began to laugh at the
prisoners when they prayed. He said that some shouted obscenities about
them being terrorists. The prisoners, he said, continued without
acknowledging the hecklers with M-16s.

Then the soldiers began to demand that the prisoners stand up for
head counts, he said. When the prisoners refused to get up and
continued to pray, the soldiers hoisted them to their feet and
sometimes punched them.

That, Wadi said, is when things changed.

"The soldiers told us, 'We will teach you a lesson.' We told them,
'If you want to do something, you will be sorry. We are not afraid to
die for our religion,' " Wadi said. "We told them, 'If you want to stop
us from praying, we will fight you to the death.' "

Wadi said that for him and many other prisoners, the battle came to
seem like a religious war between Muslim prisoners and American
soldiers who seemed to hate Islam.

Four years at Kandahar and Guantanamo, where he was shipped in
January 2002, only hardened that impression, Wadi told a McClatchy
reporter. Speaking at a coffee shop in Bahrain, Wadi — a former clerk
at the Bahraini Defense Ministry — turned his wrists for inspection. He
had pencil-thin scars across his flesh, left by tight handcuffs and
shackles, he said.

Far from the battlefields of Afghanistan, Wadi and other detainees believed that they were fighting for the dignity of Islam.

After his first month, at Guantanamo's Camp X-Ray, Wadi was given a copy of the Quran.

Shortly after that, he said, guards began to include the Qurans in their searches of cells.

During one of the first searches, he said, "they threw mine (Quran) on the floor; a soldier kicked it."

"We became angry and asked him, 'Why did you do that?' He said,
'What did I do?' We said, 'You kicked our holy Quran. He said, 'Oh,
this book?' And then he kicked it again. We started to scream and kick
the fence."

An officer came to the cellblock to see why the detainees were
making so much noise. Told that a soldier had kicked a Quran, the
officer apologized, Wadi said.

"He said the soldier was a fool," Wadi said. "We said, 'OK, please do not let it happen again.' "

Five days later, a different soldier threw a Quran to the floor and kicked it, Wadi said.

Wadi was moved to Guantanamo's Camp Delta in May 2002, where he
stayed until his release. He said he was called in for interrogation
less frequently than he had been before; months passed without him
being asked a single question. When he was called in, he said, the
pointed questions about his role in al Qaida were gone.

"They didn't give me any idea about my case; they just said, 'What
do you want to talk about?' They didn't ask me any questions," Wadi
said. "I said, 'Are you joking? You have me here and have no
questions?' "

As the interrogations faded away, however, things were heating up between the detainees and the soldiers, Wadi said.

"Some days they (soldiers) would be nice; they would ask us what we
needed. But other days they would be mean, for no reason, just to get
us to react so they could beat us," Wadi said. "The soldiers who pushed
us got spit at, peed on or had (feces) thrown at them."

As he spoke about detainees throwing feces at soldiers' faces, Wadi
cracked a grin: "It would scare them. They would run to the medic for a
shot."

But when those soldiers came back from the medic, he said, they'd go
directly to the cell of the detainee in question and beat him until he
couldn't stand up.

Years in prison and what passed for a legal system in the Bush
administration's war on terrorism, however, did nothing to establish
whether Wadi was who he claimed to be or whether he was an al Qaida
member who'd fought American troops and their Afghan allies, as the
Americans alleged.

Wadi told interrogators that he'd gone to Afghanistan in October
2001 to give cash to poor families as part of his Islamic duty to give
a portion of his salary to charity.

He left Kabul, he said, after his hotel manager told him that it was
no longer safe for him to be in Afghanistan because Arabs were being
kidnapped and sold for bounties to the Americans. In Pakistan, he said,
he went to a checkpoint — he wasn't sure whether it was police or
military — to ask for help getting to the Bahraini Embassy. Instead, he
said, the Pakistani authorities turned him over to the Americans.

The interrogators said he was an al Qaida member whom the Pakistanis
had arrested after he fled Afghanistan, where he fought in the battle
of Tora Bora. The timing of his flight from Afghanistan, early to
mid-December, coincides with that fight, in which Osama bin Laden and
other top al Qaida leaders escaped to Pakistan.

Wadi's attorney, Mark Sullivan, said he didn't track down the
details of his client's story but that he'd found nothing in the
American military's files that disputed it.

"There was an absolute lack of evidence that would disprove anything he said," he said. "There was no credible evidence."

Sullivan said he'd submitted a list of reasons that the government's case was flawed but he never heard anything back.

"You have stories like Adil's: It sounds plausible, but if you were
of a suspicious mind you could say it's vague . . . and we don't have
any corroboration," Sullivan said. "But what we keep coming back to is
what does the government have in the way of proof?"